Cyprus peace talks to resume seeking end to bitter conflict

NICOSIA (Reuters) - Peace talks resume in divided Cyprus on Tuesday in a fresh attempt to end one of Europe’s most enduring conflicts and a decades-old obstacle to Turkey’s hopes of joining the European Union.

Cyprus' President Nicos Anastasiades arrives at a European Union leaders summit at the EU council headquarters in Brussels December 20, 2013. REUTERS/Yves Herman

Leaders of the island’s rival Greeks and Turks are due to meet in no-mans-land, at an airport compound in the capital Nicosia that was abandoned in past fighting and is now used as a base for the United Nations peacekeeping force. It will be their first formal encounter for almost 18 months.

Nicos Anastasiades, president of the internationally recognized Cypriot government, and Turkish Cypriot leader Dervis Eroglu will mandate a U.N. envoy to read out a joint statement outlining the basic principles that should govern a settlement.

They will then leave their aides to negotiate the minutiae of any deal in a process which could take months, aimed at healing the split between the two sides caused by war in 1974.

“I do not only wish (Tuesday) will be the start of a process which yields results, but I am also vowing that I will work towards this,” Kudret Ozersay, the Turkish Cypriot chief negotiator, said on Twitter.

Cyprus’s partition is a headache for the European Union. The island is represented in the EU by its Greek Cypriots, with veto-wielding rights over Turkey’s wish to join the bloc.

Turkey invaded Cyprus’s north in 1974 after a Greek inspired coup. It provides political and financial support to a breakaway Turkish Cypriot state there.

DIRECTION

Endless rounds of talks have failed to make headway on attempts to unite Cyprus as a union of two autonomous regions with one central government.

“It’s a good text ... it certainly helps set the direction (of talks) and that can only be a good thing,” one diplomat told Reuters, referring to the joint statement outlining the principles of a deal.

But a junior partner in Anastasiades’s center-right coalition, the centrist Democratic Party, says the text is unbalanced in Turkey’s favor and has said it could quit the government over the issue.

“The Turkish side achieves most of its long-standing ambitions, before talks have even started,” said party Chairman Nicholas Papadopoulos, son of the late Tassos Papadopoulos, a former president who rejected a U.N. reunification blueprint in 2004.

The threat is to a government which brokered a painful international bailout last year, staving off bankruptcy, and it could complicate an EU and IMF-directed economic reform program that Cyprus has undertaken in return for 10 billion euros in aid.

Analysts, however, said the impact to the bailout if the party did quit the government would be minimal.

“If they do quit the coalition they won’t mess up the MOU too much,” said British economist Fiona Mullen, referring to the economic adjustment program. “Because (if they did) they will get blamed for the collapse of the economy.”